MiniDAB handheld digital radio to debut at £180

UK digital radio company Oono will ship its first handheld offering, the iPod-esque MiniDAB, in June. The asking price? A mere £180, the company told Reg Hardware today.

The MiniDAB sports a 2in, 160 x 96, six-line mono display. It's got 128MB of Flash memory on board, but you can boost its storage capacity by up to 2GB by adding an MMC or SD card. The memory's not just for storing station pre-sets - the MiniDAB is a full MP3 player, capable not only of recieving songs copied over from a computer, but recording whatever sound source is hooked up to its line-in port.

In addition to the standard 3.5mm earphone socket - the headphones double up as the radio's antenna, incidentally - the MiniDAB has its own speaker. There's an aerial cable bundled to allow the device to pick up broadcasts when you're not using earphones. The device is designed to pick up DAB broadcasts in the 174-240MHz band, and there's an analogue FM tuner on board just in case.

The radio is powered by a 1550mAh battery, charged through the USB 2.0 port. Oono claims a full charge will yield up to eight hours' digital radio listening, up to 30 hours with the FM radio, 28 hours' MP3 playback, or 23 hours' operation if you listen to recordings made with the built-in microphone.

The whole thing weighs a mere 95g and measures 9.9 x 5.6 x 1.9cm. It will be available in - surprise, surprise - black and white verisons. ®